promoting your indie podcast

Cross-promotion is the tried-and-true practice of using one podcast to advertise another. If you’ve ever been listening to a podcast and heard an ad for a different show? That’s cross-promotion. 

There are a few different ways cross-promotion happens in the podcasting world. Networks tend to promote their shows on their other shows, both through trailers and by encouraging their more established shows to have the hosts of new shows on as guests. Hosting services like Acast use automated dynamic ad insertion, including trailers for other Acast shows. 

For indie podcasts, the process is often more informal. At Witch, Please Productions, we’ll identify a related podcast through market research, organic discovery, or because we’re already having a podcaster on one of our shows as a guest. The simplest ask is a trailer swap: you play a one-minute trailer for our show, we’ll play a one-minute trailer for your show. If the show we’re connecting with has a significantly larger listenership than us, we might negotiate impressions (a.k.a the number of listeners who will encounter the trailer) or simply agree on the number of episodes the trailers will appear on. If we think our shows are particularly aligned, we might propose a guest swap: you have us on your show and we’ll have you on ours. 

The podcasting space is very noisy, and that poses a challenge for podcast listeners who want to find interesting shows without spending hours and hours scrolling through their podcast apps. Listeners tend to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations to find new shows (which is true for many kinds of media, to the enduring frustration of tech bros who want to invent automated solutions to discovery). Meanwhile, indie podcasts might struggle to find a way to reach listeners, especially considering that social media is pretty much broken. 

A trailer for another podcast dropped into a show you already listen to functions quite a lot like a word-of-mouth recommendation. The trailer’s presence in a trusted show implies an alignment of values and approach, making it feel like a recommendation even if the podcast host isn’t literally recommending it. In the world of scholarly podcasting, a trailer can function almost like a citation; it creates a web of connection, implying if not a full-throated endorsement then at least a pathway your listener might want to follow.

You need two things to get started: a good one-minute trailer for your podcast, and a connection to a like-minded show. A good one-minute trailer will introduce listeners to the sound of your voice, give them a taste of what your show is like (tone, format, vibe), and provide a catchy tagline to help listeners remember your show when they go to look it up. Below we’ve posted a few ads from the podcast Material Girls.

When it comes to finding like-minded shows, the more organic the connection the better. Pitch to shows you genuinely listen to and enjoy so make the cross-promotion as genuine as possible. Poorly executed cross-promotion can undermine listener trust, but if you’re careful and deliberate you have the potential to build a powerful network. Need somewhere to start? Try typing the name of your podcast into Rephonic.